Your Mac could be hijacked through major security flaw in Zoom conferencing app – CNET

July 9, 2019
25

Zoom says the flaw was born out of a workaround for Safari 12.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Your computer's webcam has always been a gateway for potential security intrusion, which is why people like Mark Zuckerberg and ex-FBI head James Comey put tape over theirs. On Monday, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh gave Mac users another reason to fret over their webcams — there's a security flaw in the Zoom video-conferencing app.

Zoom is most notable for its click-to-join feature, where clicking on a browser link takes you directly to a video meeting in Zoom's app. But Leitschuh in a Medium post explained that he months ago discovered Zoom achieves this in insecure ways, allowing websites to join you to a call as well as activating your webcam without your permission.

He adds that this would allow any webpage to denial-of-service a Mac by repeatedly joining you to an invalid call. Uninstalling the Zoom app from your Mac isn't enough to fix the problem, either. Zoom achieves its click-to-join function by installing a web server on your computer — which can reinstall Zoom without your permission.

"If you've ever installed the Zoom client and then uninstalled it, you still have a localhost web server on your machine that will happily re-install the Zoom client for you," Leitschuh writes, "without requiring any user interaction on your behalf besides visiting a webpage. This re-install 'feature' continues to work to this day."

The researcher says he contacted Zoom on March 26, giving the company a public disclosure deadline of 90 days. He says Zoom patched the issue, disabling the ability of a webpage to automatically turn on your webcam, but still this partial fix regressed on July 7, allowing webcams to once again be turned on without permission.

Zoom in a statement said the local web server is a workaround for Apple's Safari 12 web browser introduced last September.

"Zoom installs a local web server on Mac devices running the Zoom client," the statement reads. "This is a workaround to an architecture change introduced in Safari 12 that requires a user to accept launching Zoom before every meeting. The local web server automatically accepts the peripheral access on behalf of the user to avoid this extra click before joining a meeting. We feel that this is a legitimate solution to a poor user experiRead More – Source

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